The Two Percenter

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

What connection can possibly be drawn between Murray
Rothbard, a non-believing Jew, the Ould
Sod and a saint of the Church?

That was the ruse to get you to read on. This has nothing to do with religious belief
but plenty to do with Murray, ancient Ireland and liberty.

In his classic For a New
Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Professor Rothbard makes a compelling case for a stateless society. To dismiss the blarney that such a world is a
pipe dream, he cites numerous historical precedents when humans coexisted harmoniously
without the benefit (impediment?) of an overarching state structure. Among his examples is ancient Ireland. He writes:

“The
most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts,
however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was
also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian,
but where they operated within a purely state-less
and libertarian

society.
This was ancient Ireland—an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path
for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the
seventeenth century”

Up
until the English takeover Ireland was,
“a highly complex society that was, for
centuries, the

most advanced, most
scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.”

Yet for over a millennium: “ancient Celtic
Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish
law has written: ‘There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public
enforcement of justice. There was no trace of State-administered justice.’”

Rothbard explains that the ancient Irish maintained
justice and order via a network of 80-100 voluntary associations known as tuaths.
The tuaths met periodically to
discuss and agree upon operating rules.
Those who were unhappy with the policies of their tuath were free
to leave and join another tuath.

However, legislation was sparse. For the most part the law was similar to English
Common Law practice.

“…the
law itself was based on a body of ancient and immemorial custom, passed down as
oral and

then
written tradition through a class of professional jurists called the brehons.
The brehons were in no sense public, or governmental, officials; they were
simply selected by parties to disputes on the basis of their reputations for
wisdom, knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their decisions.”

The decision of the brehons were enforced,

“Through
an elaborate, voluntarily developed system of “insurance,” or sureties. Men
were linked together by a variety of surety relationships by which they
guaranteed one another for the righting of wrongs, and for the enforcement of
justice and the decisions of the brehons. In short, the brehons themselves were
not involved in the enforcement of decisions, which rested again
with private individuals linked through sureties.”

In short, the Irish were governed by private contractual
laws. These laws were developed over
time by custom and enforced socially by the community at large.

“…this
system applied to all offences, aggressions and assaults as well as commercial
contracts; in short, it applied to all cases of what we would call “civil” and “criminal”
law. All criminals were considered to be “debtors” who owed restitution and
compensation to their victims, who thus became their “creditors.” The victim
would gather his sureties around him and proceed to apprehend the criminal or
to proclaim his suit publicly and demand that the defendant submit to adjudication
of their dispute with the brehons. The criminal might then send his own
sureties to negotiate a settlement or agree to submit the dispute to the brehons.
If he did not do so, he was considered an “outlaw” by the entire community; he
could no longer enforce any claim of his own in the courts, and he was treated
to the opprobrium of the entire community.”

Rothbard concludes:

Thus,
we have indicated that it is perfectly possible, in theory and historically, to
have efficient and courteous police, competent and learned judges, and a body
of systematic and

socially
accepted law—and none of these things being furnished by a coercive government.

Thus the Irish lived in relative peace for over a thousand
years without a centralized, compulsive state authority.

The same could be said of the ancient Hebrews. From the
time of their re-entry into Canaan after fleeing Egypt, they lived under the
written law of the Torah which was administered by local “Judges”. This lasted for about 200 years until they
demanded a strong central authority for their security. The final Judge, Samuel, warned them that this strong
central authority, the king that they wished for, would:

“…take your sons and assign them to his chariots and
horses, and they will run before his chariot.

He will also appoint from
among them his commanders of groups of a thousand and of a hundred soldiers. He
will set them to do his plowing and his harvesting, and to make his implements
of war and the equipment of his chariots.

He will use your daughters
as ointment-makers, as cooks, and as bakers.

He will take the best of
your fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials.

He will tithe your crops
and your vineyards, and give the revenue to his eunuchs and his slaves.

He will take your male and
female servants, as well as your best oxen and your asses, and use them to do
his work.

He will tithe your flocks
and you yourselves will become his slaves.”

Sure
enough the Hebrew kings did all of that.
Within three generations the kingdom was divided and at war with
itself. In time the Hebrew people would be conquered,
enslaved and exiled from their homeland.
This example gives concrete proof to Ben Franklin’s axiom that, “He who
sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”

Thus the
two key takeaways from this essay should be:

1.The State, whose existent is rationalized
by the supposed protection of its subjects often extracts onerous costs and
ultimately fails in its mission

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Fans of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire may recall how the
series opened with protagonist Nucky Thompson fervently denouncing demon
alcohol before the Ladies Temperance League.
In the very next scene the same Nucky Thompson schemes with his cronies to
make millions by subverting the new Prohibition laws and keeping AC awash in
hooch.

If he did not get it, surely some of his Tinseltown
toadies must have caught the joke. Only days before, this same president did an
end run around Congress to impose Net Neutrality by dubious administrative
fiat.

The Prez berated Beijing for forcing “all foreign
companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government
mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those
services,"

Like Nucky before the temperance league, Obama was
playing for Silicon Valley. Like all
statists he sells the illusion of protection while stabbing constituents in the back.

Like the U.S., the Chinese government justifies its
excesses by blaming terrorists and the need to protect “state secrets”.

The very fact that People’s Republic or the USA has “state secrets” flat out
contradicts the claim that either is a “government of the people, for the
people and by the people”.

Can state secrets by justified by the same logic as
the national debt? Apologists for
government debt tells us not to worry, we owe the money to ourselves. Does that mean that we keep secrets from
ourselves too?

No one keeps secrets from themselves unless they in
pathological denial. This means that the
keepers of state secrets are either hiding bad things from us or they are
deranged. I vote for a combination of
the two.

A couple of weeks ago, both guests on the OnFire Radio Show, referred
to the high level government officials as psychopaths. They may be on to something. Perhaps like Norman Bates, the men at the helm
of states lose touch with who and what they are. The lose sight of right and wrong as we most
people understand it by kindergarten.

“if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy
itself. But if it comes from God, you will not
be able to destroy them.”(Acts 5 33-39)

In support of his case, he cited earlier popular
“messiahs” that had come and gone of their own accord.

Today, when the West is challenged by radical Islam,
Gamaliel’s sage advice rings true.
Leaving the Islamic Middle East alone to work out its issues may be the
most prudent and productive response.

A thumbnail portrait of Middle Eastern history and
quick peek into the probable future will provide useful perspective.

From ancient times up until the 16th
Century, the legendary Silk Road and associated spice trading routes were the commercial arteries through
which Europe obtained precious silks, spices and even opiates. These routes passed through
Persia and the Arabic lands. The Middle
East was prime real estate and its inhabitants prosperous traders.

Fortunes plummeted when Columbus returned from his voyage
to the New World. With the Age of
Discovery, oceanic shipping displaced land based commerce, Thus the Atlantic facing nations including
England, France, Spain and the Netherlands rose to world dominance while the
Middle East and Italy, then the commercial hub of Europe, withered into irrelevance.

However, the invention of the internal combustion
engine coupled with the discovery of Middle Eastern petroleum made the Islamic
desert wastelands a hot commodity again.
Following the First World War, the Western imperial powers assured
themselves of access to Mid-East oil by divvying up the region into client
states ruled by compliant war lords.

From that time onward, imperialist meddling in
Mid-East by Europeans and the U.S. has never ceased. A century of political,
economic and military intervention by Christian, Jewish and secular Westerners has
stoked nationalist and religious resentments alike. This is manifested in the violent “blowback” that Ron Paul and our own CIA has documented.

A look forward validates the Gamaliel strategy. The fracking boom combined with new energy efficient
technologies have broken the Mid-East stranglehold on energy. The world is awash in petroleum and prices
have tanked. Experts estimate that we
have a supply of over 200 years of crude in the ground. My guess is that way before the supply runs out,
the human race will have moved onto new energy technologies and Mid-East
oil will as relevant as Silk Road trade routes in a jet plane world.

As oil income wanes in importance, the region’s
people will seek other livelihoods. This
will require innovation and investment which demands economic and social liberalization. At that point you can kiss radical Islam goodbye unless, it is “from
God” as Gamaliel hedged 2,000 years back.

If it is from God, so be it. But I don’t think so. Meanwhile, Islamists use political, cultural
and emotional

Jujutsu. Jihadists turn the force of Western incursions back upon
their opponents. The harder that America strikes at them, the more foolish we
look.

A half century ago, The United States faced a far
more formidable threat from the Soviet Union, a true military super power. At that time Princeton scholar, George Kennan,
recommended a policy of “containment”, diplomatic and economic initiatives to
hem in Stalinist – Soviet expansionism. This
formed the basis of U.S. foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Marshall plan to rebuild war torn Europe and
Asia was the type of program that he envisioned. This was s patient Gamaliel
approach. Unfortunately, America’s militarists misrepresented Kennan’s intent. They exploited it to justify a massive
military buildup, nuclear proliferation and unceasing armed intervention the
world over.

President Eisenhower, the diplomat/warrior hero of
World War II, perceived the folly of continual proxy wars and runaway military
expansion. He withdrew from the Korean
War and warned his countrymen of the
dangers of the “military industrial” complex in
his presidential farewell speech:

“In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ultimately, America prevailed in its showdown with
the Soviet Union, because of Gamaliel theory, not armed confrontation. Because Soviet Communism was oppositional to
human nature, it collapsed under its own weight. It was of man, not of God.

“a large standing
Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a
Country…it could not be done
without great oppression of the people.”

America’s enormous warfare establishment
makes us unsafe by intervening in intractable international conflicts that are
beyond our control and in which we have no moral standing or compelling
interest. Americans are best served by
the Gamaliel strategy of allowing the will of God or nature to take its course,

Friday, February 13, 2015

Up until now, the
Piltdown Man was one of the great scientific hoaxes of all time. In 1912, a collection of
carefully doctored human-like remains were unearthed near the village of Piltdown
in Sussex, England. These findings were
put forward and readily accepted as the missing evolutionary link between man
and ape. This farce stood for nearly 50
years as scientific “consensus” until it was demonstrated that this discovery
was a mélange of human and orangutan bones of fairly recent vintage. They had been dyed and filed to look like the
Real McCoy fossils of a heretofore unknown species.

To this day, the jokesters remain anonymous and no one was bilked out of
billions of dollars. The worst that can
be said is that the worldwide scientific community got punked and ate a healthy
slice of humble pie.

Scientific shenanigans are afoot again in new millennium. This time the tables are turned. Scientists are pulling the wool over our eyes
with the climate change scam. In a February
7 Telegraph article, Christopher
Booker reports on how global temperature data has been fudged upward at
monitoring stations throughout the world.
The article is based upon the investigations of Paul Homewood. Booker writes:

“When
future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years,
nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature
records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically
“adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data
justified.”

But what about those poor polar bears whose icy home is melting away? Homewood demonstrates that is not global warning
that is causing the thaw.Rather the diminished
ice is the result of:

“cyclical
shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years
ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.”

And why would scientists throughout the world be party to such as scam? The reason is that “Big Science” is
underwritten by “Big Government”. Just
as Big Government handsomely paid Big Science to create weapons of mass destruction
and disruption, they are now in cahoots to shake taxpayers down with the warming
scare.

Another present day “scientific” canard comes courtesy of those who
practice economics as if it were particle physics. Econometricians would have us think they can
pull a few levers and people will respond predictably as if they were rats
in a Skinner Box.

Thus central bankers adjust the flow of legal tender intent upon
modifying our behavior, supposedly for our own wellbeing. Here is what happens:

1.Elite
bankers and financiers get newly created money first to invest or spend it as
they see fit.

2.This new
money makes it way downstream in the economy, thereby devaluing the currency
that Joe and Jane Sixpack hold. This
drives up the nominal cash prices of the things that Joe and Jane must
buy. Meanwhile the elites were able to
buy things at lower prices before inflationary pricing kicked in.

3.The U.S.
Fed seems pleased with itself that the Consumer Price Index is increasing at a “modest”
and “steady” 2% per year.

4.This means
that if Joe and Jane just hold on to their money, it decreases in worth by 2%
each year.

5.Since The
Fed is also suppressing interest rates at near 0%, Joe and Jane will still lose
purchasing power

by putting money in a savings account – formerly a time honored way of
building up middle class wealth in America.

6.So it
order to break even, Joe and Jane must move their savings into risky
investments like securities and commodities.

7.This
again benefits the elite Wall Street crowd by artificially pumping up the value
of the stocks and bonds that they hold.

policies of The Fed and
world’s central bankers rob unsuspecting millions of their savings. They encourage malinvestment and inflate
financial bubbles that create hardship and misery on a global scale.

The real question is, “why do people keep falling for the empty promises
of the ruling elites?” I suspect it that
people have lost faith in themselves and in any other higher power. Therefore, like captives under the spell of a
worldwide Stockholm Syndrome, they wish to believe that their captors have
their best interests at heart.

The moral at the end of Steve Goodman’s con man saga, Turnpike
Tom, is this:

“Remember
that you only fall for
Lies and stories when you really want to”